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The Health Hazards of Marijuana
| Article
# : |
18458 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
3,124 Words |
| Author
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Gabriel G. Nahas
Gabriel G. Nahas, M.D., is professor of anesthesiology at the
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and
adjunct professor at the University of Paris. He is the author
of fifteen books and monographs and more than 600 papers, a
quarter of them on dependence-producing drugs. |
The Columbia University Encyclopedia of 1975 stated: “Most evidence indicates that marijuana does not induce mental or physical deterioration.” Such a statement reflected the general opinion in academia at that time. And yet already in 1975, at a symposium convened in Helsinki, it was reported that careful analysis of the effects of marijuana on experimental animals and on man pointed toward the possibility of long-term damaging effects of the drug on brain metabolism, learning and behavior, the immune system, reproductive functions, and fetal development. At the same meeting, it was pointed out that “the human pathology of marijuana-smoking population will have been completed.” Now, 15 years later, scientific studies have significantly strengthened the implication that marijuana damages some of the most vital functions of the body.
Memory and behavior
The acute impairment of mental performance by marijuana is well recognized: A stoned individual is incapable of thinking straight. M.I. Souief, from Cairo University, reported in the fifties that this impairment was present well beyond the period of acute intoxication; but many American psychologists refused to accept the validity of Souief's carefully documented measurements performed on several hundred chronic hashish users. (Hashish is closely related to marijuana.) These psychologists referred instead to a Costa Rican study by Jack Fletcher of the University of Miami, who had reported in 1973 that heavy marijuana users scored as well as a control group of nonmarijuana users on several tests of learning and memory. In 1984, however, Fletcher and his colleagues performed a new battery of psychological tests on the same cohort of Latin American marijuana users and nonusers, obtaining results contradictory to those obtained in 1973. Fletcher's follow-up report shows that the use of cannabis (marijuana) produces selective impairment of short-term memory skills and attention.
In 1988, a study by V.K. Varma also reported short-term memory impairment in heavy marijuana smokers studied in northern India. Finally, in 1989, Dr. Richard Schwartz of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., reported the results of an exceptionally well-controlled study of persistent short-term memory impairment in a group of primarily white, American, middle-class adolescents. Schwartz began this study after he noticed that cannabis-dependent adolescents who have just entered a rehabilitation program experience difficulties in recalling newly learned rules as well as remembering conversations and exchanges in their group therapy sessions. These adolescents report that such memory deficits
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